May 12th

We left from school in the RV around 4 o'clock with everything packed. We had a smooth ride and showed up in Saratoga around 10:00 that night and slept overnight in the local state park. The car was checked over and fine then and Joe V. worked on our communication system for talking to the dirver of the car. It went down to 26 degrees that night so we all felt bad for thoes sleeping in the car, trailer and in James' case outside.

May 13th

Woke up at 6 in the morning after a very cold night and left for the testing day. Upon getting there we preceeded to cook breakfast and went around checking out the car for inspection. One of the batteries turned out to be bad and needed to be replaced and the car was somewhat sparking because one wire had melted into the other and they were both replaced. After completing the mechanical inspetions and checking out the other cars we moved on to more car preformance tests. Tom was our driver and preformed various excercises and testing acceleration and the breaks. Our car also competed in a hill climb and during this time the belt chain slipped off the sprocket and more repairs were made to it. We spent the night at Moreau State park which had awesome showers! =D

May 14th

Today was our first showing day at the Saratoga Springs Auto Show. We, and the rest of the Solar, electric and Hybrid cars show cased the Zodiac along with various classic cars. Mr. Marshall drove down on his bike that day to visit with us and alot of pictures were taken which hopefully soon will be up on the site. Unfortunatley our car had not been charged over the night so we had to be extra careful it would recieve a full charge for the race the next day.

May 15th

Today was the race day for the Zodiac. Our first driver was mike who drove a full Medium lap, followed by Leslie who drove a full second and Tom our third driver started the next lap and the car ran out of batteries. It was a terrible rainy day on top of that which didn't help our preformance along with the hills which the Zodiac doesn't have the torque to overcome. After the race we went to watch the autocross we couldn't compete in due to our car only having three wheels followed by a trip to the mall, bowling and ice cream.

May 16th

Today was our final day of the trip and we began it by driving to Albany New York and showing it there along with the other Tour De Sol vehicles. Governer Pataki gave a speech there and took pictures with our car and many people showed intrest which is always good. Our car recieved second place in the 1-manned solar powered vehicle category. We drove back around 2 and arrived at the high school at about 7:30 which was alot better then our originally anticipated 10:00 or later arrival. After cleaning out the RV we all headed home.